Inspiration
It is well known with NBA fans that the Miami Heat forward, Chris Bosh, looks and acts like an ostrich. The likeness is astounding and the best way to show it is through the picture below (not made by me). Due to his similarity to an ostrich, Chris is called the Bostrich by many fans of basketball. So for my artifact, I wanted to see how the Bostrich would look in the wild.
[http://imgur.com/gallery/j56no]
Original Images
I started with two images originally, one of Chris Bosh and one of two ostriches in the wild. They are both shown below.
Image 1: Two ostriches seemingly making noises at each other
[http://animals.about.com/od/birds/ig/Ostrich-Pictures/Two-Ostriches.htm]
Image 2: Chris Bosh making a very ostrich-like facial expression
[http://shoeuntied.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/the-worlds-ugliest-athletes-my-top-10/]
Making of Artifact
My artifact consists of Bosh's head on the left most ostrich's body and I will now describe how it was created. I first needed to cut out Bosh's head from his original image. This was done using my intelligent scissor code from this project. Below is the contour and the mask that was created by outlining Bosh's head with the intelligent scissor.
Image 3: Contour
Image 4: Mask
The next steps were performed using GIMP (free GNU Image manipulation program). Using the mask, I was able to extract just the picture of Bosh's head. Then, I added his head as a new layer to the picture of the two ostriches. The next step was to scale down the head so it is a similar size to that of the ostriches. After that, the head was placed on top of the left most ostrich's head and beak. At that point, Bosh's head did not blend well with the ostrich body so I had to remove part of the beak and replace it with the sky and also decrease Bosh's neck size so it tapers to fit on the ostrich's slender neck. Lastly, I blended the neck colors together so the contrast was not so dramatic. My resulting artifact of the Bostrich in the Wild is shown below.
Image 5: Artifact
